1. Experience: mixed. ChatGPT sometimes excels at "what's wrong with my code" and often excels at "convert this format to some other format" type of tasks. It's saved me a lot of time, especially the latter type of prompts. Sometimes though, it gives completely wrong answers (hallucination) even though they sound right and even given more prompts it can't arrive at the right solution, at which point I have to fall back to StackOverflow. In general it's probably improved my efficiency by ~5-10% because the random hallucination and the waste of time that leads to, definitely not a massive difference but helpful nonetheless.

2. I haven't tried Copilot because I don't see the $19/month they're asking as worth it. It's not too distracting for me to have chatgpt open on half of the screen and just copy/paste code between that window and my IDE, I don't see the integrated coding experience as that much better. Also, I don't find myself using generated code as-is most of the time so I don't need IDE integration, generated code merely provides a helpful starting point / a point of reference to get started writing code.

3. Never heard of Kagi or Dash. Kagi seems similar to DuckDuckGo. I find the search experience to be good when using Google + ChatGPT so I don't see much of a reason to switch - I'll admit that I prioritize user experience over privacy concerns most of the time (exception being financial stuff and when I'm building software for my own users :))

ChatGPT with stackoverflow

What has been your experience with AI-assisted coding?
I use ChatGPT (4) and overall love it, makes things really fast, but is not good on edge cases e.g. with newer frameworks like the current version of Nextjs. I also have gotten some overly complicated solution proposals sometimes. But its especially a breeze on debugging.

Have you tried both Copilot and ChatGPT? If so, which one would you recommend?
I use CodeWhisperer and ChatGPT and use them for different purposes. ChatGPT is like my mentor, that I interact and also discuss topics with. CodeWhisperer is more for a quick function or autocompletion.

I'm considering making a permanent switch from Google to Kagi. Have you tried it?
Do you use an offline documentation viewer?
No, and no.

I don't use Google, if using copilot+chatgpt+dash+SO works.

AI-assisted coding has definitely sped up my development speed, and I rarely have to google anything anymore.

I don't think you can compare ChatGPT and Copilot, though. Copilot is basically just a wrapper in another app (Visual Studio, etc.) for the Codex model of GPT. (I know it's more, but high level is it that).

Experiences vary with Copilot because people either understand what Copilot is actually doing, or they don't - and expect magic. When you understand you're prompting an AI model with your code and what you write around the code you're building, you'll get amazing results.

For example, I always start with a descriptive function name and comments that spell out the logic the function needs to do. 80% of the time, Copilot will suggest correct code, that I don't have to edit. The other 20%, I might have to make some small adjustments, but it always compiles or runs. Being descriptive is key, it's like explaining a colleague on what they have to build.

I find ChatGPT good for figuring out issues with tech where the docs and issues are seemingly obscure. MySQL and Docker in particular.

Tried CoPilot on PHPStorm for a month. It was pretty decent, but I felt like I had to spend half my time refactoring away the hallucinated function names.

Cursor looks good, but I'm a Jetbrains guy so I need that sort of interaction on a fully-fledged IDE. VS Code extensions can bring a lot of functionality but it has never felt as cohesive as a purpose-built IDE for me.

Been using DDG for years. I only switch to !g for highly semantic searches or to confirm DDG not finding something (most of the time Goog can't find it either). Kagi seems decent but haven't felt the need to try it yet.

I don't use AI editor tools like Copilot yet but plan to try.
But I do use ChatGPT for research about things I'm bad at and to find better ways to build something on top of my own solution, how to refactor code and such

I use Copilot - it saves me typing the stupid stuff such as wiring or mocking a json file that just needs to be done. With Copilot 50-200 characters become one tab-press.

It saves some time but the better benefit is that it automates the boring stuff and allows me to focus on the fun problem solving part of coding.

Thank you all for your responses!

For anyone interested: I have tried Kagi because Google Search is ad and SEO infested. Kagi results are much cleaner than Google’s and I like you can tailor it to your usage and both boost and sink sites from your results. But the trial version is just 100 free queries, and I ran out of them in just four days 😬. They won’t extend it.

I would have loved to be able to try Kagi for at lest 15 days or a month before deciding. Of course I could just spend $5 or $10 and become a paid member with 300 or unlimited searches and then decide. But these days I have been using ChatGPT Plus and I think I will stick to it and back to Google Search, but from now routing many searches I used to do with Google to ChatGPT. So I think I ChatGPT will make me googling less. Thus, I’m ditching Kagi for the moment.

From your replies, I think I won’t be trying Copilot, sticking to ChatGPT Plus instead. If I’m not mistaken, ChatGPT Plus seems superior than Copilot for my use case.

I still have to test Cursor more thoroughly.

Regarding Dash, I think I’m going to subscribe. It’s cheap and I think it could save me preocious time while I code.